Rambles at starchamber.com

I think I’ve just verified from my monthly stats that the majority of the activity on this site come from search engines and bots of one kind or another. The single biggest visitor, with about 160 visits in March, is the Spyonit.com bot. With luck, those hits are actually bringing a few people in. To [...]

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Today’s Easter special: Somebody at Emory Medical School found a free operating room and performed some Marshmallow Peep Surgery. Apparently five of the little guys were joined hip-to-hip and required a sophisticated surgical procedure to separate them. Warning: these pages are quite explicit and not for the faint-of-heart. If you get queasy watching marshmallows bleed, [...]

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Nice short article in The Scientist on various biological databases and what they do. Want to know about reverse transcriptase, the crowbar that lets pesky retroviruses like HIV jimmy their way into your DNA? Try browsing around PFAM protein database at Washington University in St. Louis.

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One of the few good things about Oscar season is the bitchy Oscar show reviews. For a scalding run-down on this year’s antics, don’t miss Cintra Wilson’s piece at Salon… Oscars 2002: Somebody make it stop!. An excerpt:
I must warn the world about Tom Cruise. I feel he is an utterly terrifying Superior Life Form, [...]

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Cool! I notice that Kevin Kelly has linked to my piece about the Whole Earth Review from last year. You never know who’s going to link to your site.

Speaking of Kevin Kelly, by the way, the Coffee Czar pointed me to this article in the NY Times about how technology is changing how we think [...]

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Steven Vogel has written another book, bless his heart: Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle. He has written several books that focus on the engineering aspects of biological systems, that is, thinking of organisms in terms of their physical design. This is going to be one of the great themes of the 21st century, [...]

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Article in The Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch: Seeing Around Corners. It’s about simulations, complex systems, and applications of systems-based thinking to historical analysis of things like the fate of the Anasazi in the southwest.

Speaking of simulations that help you understand the world, I assume you know that Stephen Wolfram’s book on cellular automata that [...]

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Meta-blog that everybody else reads but I just discovered: Virginia Postrel’s Dynamist.com. Her site was popular enough last year to bring in $1490.00 from Amazon tips and book referrals. It won’t pay the rent, but it sure sounds like more than most “tip me” blogs pull.

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Digital Biology, a book about synthetic life by Peter Bentley, got a favorable review in the NY Times. There’ve been a number of books published recently along these lines, notably Flesh and Machines by MIT AI and robotics wizard Rodney Brooks, and Creation by Creatures developer Steve Grand. It’s a lot to keep up with, [...]

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US Attorney General John Ashcroft is one weird dude. But don’t take my word for it.

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